Was this doctor a domestic tyrant?

Here is the fourth instalment from an article by Shirley Smith based on the autobiography of Phoebe Hesketh, What Can the Matter Be? Phoebe Hesketh is today well known for the biography of her famous aunt, the Preston suffragette Edith Rigby but her autobiographical account of life in Edwardian Preston also makes interesting reading.

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Phoebe remarks that her father generally showed more concern for his patients, or later his second wife, than he did for her mother. Gertrude became seriously ill with what she was told by her family was colitis but learned the truth from a nurse whose brutal response to Gertrude’s pain was “What can you expect with cancer of the liver?”. During the latter stages of her illness Phoebe remembers hearing her mother screaming in pain and her attempts to distract her with Bezique and eke out the time between doses of morphine.

Dr Rayner would always administer the last morphine injection of the day after he finished work and Phoebe would be stationed on the wide bedroom window-ledge of her mother’s bedroom watching for the headlights on his car sweeping down the hill. Her description of this time as they wait for often an hour or more is harrowing as her mother kept asking for “The lights, the lights” and begging Phoebe to make them come.

Phoebe had a great respect for her mother’s abilities to manage a busy household efficiently and admired her steadfast loyalty to her husband yet her attitude towards her father could be described as ambivalent. She was clearly in awe of his skill as a doctor and his obvious concern for his patients which was not related to their ability to pay. In fact, her book is dedicated to him and she describes the words of its title, “What can the matter be?” taken from a well-loved children’s nursery rhyme as being apt for a doctor’s daughter.

However, the opening words of the book are “When I was young I was terrified of my father.” She acknowledges this changes over the course of her life but there are descriptions in her book which reveal a household that appeared to revolve around his needs. His daughters were not allowed to run around the house or to make any noise once he was home or seeing a patient.

Phoebe’s mother only practised her violin when her husband was out when she carefully removed the highly polished instrument from its case and purple silk wrap. The children were not allowed to play a note on the Steinway Grand if their father was at home though Phoebe notes “his X-ray apparatus was noisy enough.”

She remembers one occasion when, at the table with company, she disobeyed her father’s instruction to leave and go upstairs and received a “leathering”. The shocked concern on the faces around the table did little to relieve her humiliation which she notes was worse than the pain.

Nevertheless she attributes his anger to his meticulous nature and states that she looks back not with resentment but with pride in his achievements. For instance, as a child she was hospitalised for Scarlet Fever and states that without her father’s medical knowledge and intervention she would have lost her hearing completely.

Phoebe had support from her father’s sister, her Aunt Edith, who with her head on one side would smile knowingly after one of her brother’s tirades against socialist ideology and say “Your father doesn’t mean half he says.” Phoebe found it hard to believe that the two, so different from each other, could be siblings with the same upbringing.

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Next: Sisters-in-law at odds in Edwardian Winckley Square